Hi friends, 

Pride and Prejudice is my favorite novel of all time, and amongst my many favorite quotes, we have this absolute gem: 

"Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.

As someone who loves to start things more than I love to see them through, and as someone whose main hobby is having hobbies, I think about this line often. It's my kind of delusion, because me too, bestie. I would also be amazing at things if I had ever learnt them. 

I'm thinking about this now because I have already started a little series about music, despite the fact that, while I delight in music, I am not particularly qualified to speak about it. Not in any classical or technical sense. 

I've been online long enough that thoughts about qualifications are complicated to me; I've had my feathers ruffled by people assuming I have no qualifications whatsoever and by people insisting I need them in order to share my opinions on a platform I built.

And this whole question of who gets to speak has only gotten more complex in our current political climate, brought to you at least in part by anti-intellectualism. Of the many horrors we have a front row seat to, watching the race between media illiteracy and the decreasing trust in expertise has been particularly exhausting. (And violent, as we follow both of those things to their unfortunate and natural ends.) 

We should be listening to experts. We should be trusting people who know things. We should be able to tell the difference between fact and opinion, and also remember that some opinions simply carry more weight than others.

Perhaps none of that really applies here, to me, a girl who likes music and who would have been a great proficient had she ever learned. (Which is only kind of a lie. I've quit both cello and guitar lessons in my life.)

Or perhaps, this spiral I just stumbled into is one of the side effects of anti-intellectualism, particularly for those of us who do not want to watch it continue to spread. (I can't imagine that it's everyone questioning whether or not they have an opinion worth sharing.) 

There is a sense of play we could have around our own curiosity when it was more widely acknowledged that expertise had its place, and enjoyment did too. There was room to respect people who knew more than we did and still allow ourselves the pleasure of being beginners or dabblers.

...I'm not even joking that I'm not sure how I ended up here, with these thoughts. I truly just wanted to start this post with a joke about Lady Catherine. I suppose when the world is hard, everything feels high stakes. 

The only thing I think I can do here is bring it back to Lady Catherine, then. Not her unearned confidence (though, honestly, goals?), but the sense of wanting to be in the conversation simply because the subject delights you.

This Place Will Become Your Tomb

Today, the spinny wheel has offered me not just one but two songs from This Place Will Become Your Tomb. 

The aesthetics and imagery here are watery, and I am an ocean girlie at heart. I've lived on the coast most of my life, which means it was almost necessary that it became part of my identity. And when it was time to quite literally build a brand for my publishing imprint (and this here attached newsletter), I knew I wanted it to have some sense of place, some attachment to where I am physically and culturally. 

"Mareas" is tides in Spanish. 

I share all this to say that This Place Will Become Your Tomb hit me in a tender place from the outset.

If you delve into Sleep Token lore and fan theories, you'll find people trying to map a timeline across the songs. It's pretty generally accepted that we aren't quite listening to a linear story. I think I only agree with that because I believe we are listening to something tidal. 

Grief isn't neat. It doesn't move forward like a plot. It loops. It recedes. It crashes into you again months or years later when you finally thought you got better, but maybe you didn't. And This Place Will Become Your Tomb is an album soaked in grief. 

And here, we find our two songs for today.

Round 2

Descending
Album: This Place Will Become Your Tomb
Released: 2021

To me, much of the language of "Descending" feels like paired movement, these little mirrored phrases that sit right on top of each other.

Just take it all
For nothing again
Create, release
You just don't feel the same

I asked, and you answered
But you eat your words in vain
At last, discover
You can't recall my name

I don't wanna let you fall away
But I've been left no choice
Don't you see that?

There is something haunting, not only about that paired movement, the unwinnable tug of war, but about the sound of the song itself. Vessel moves between the upper and lower parts of his register, and the contrast makes the song feel like it's echoing within itself. 

And then there's this lyric layered in the back half:

(Why don't you just say what you wanted to say for once?)

Earlier in the song, we are told that when he asked, someone answered. Now, the truth comes out in the background: the answer he got wasn't perhaps the truth.

What the song keeps circling, then, is that specific heartbreak of realizing you've been having two different conversations the whole time. I just called this paired movement, but maybe it would be more accurate to call it all mirrored fractures. 

You come crawling back to me
But I'm already on the ground

The Love You Want
Album: This Place Will Become Your Tomb
Released: 2021

"The Love You Want" has always struck me as one of the most quietly devastating songs in what is a veritable sea of devastating songs. Part of the perpetual grief of this body of work is how absolutely stubborn the devotion presented is. 

Stubborn, and still very clear-eyed. 

The song opens with strained closeness, the kind where two people share space but not a direction. And then the emotional thesis arrives on an exhale and with a sort of exhausted honesty: he is still full of a love that the other person either can't take or won't take.

I cannot stress enough how much I personally think the lyric, the idea "I'm still full of the love you want," is one of the most quietly ruinous things Sleep Token has ever written. There's so little here to soften the blow. We are met only with the bald fact of it: I still have this thing you said you wanted, and I still have it in exactly the form you claimed to need, and somehow that still isn't enough to bring you closer.

The lock imagery sharpens that ache with a sense of trying combinations endlessly, sincerely, desperately, and still getting it wrong every time. And how many of us have known the heartbreak of trying our best at the wrong door?

For a Sleep Token song, it lands on the simpler side, both musically and lyrically. It ends by repeating the emotional core—I'm still full of the love you want—before calling back to the opening lines: two people close enough to touch, but somehow farther apart than ever.

The Love You Want wins for me. Don't forget to vote below.

My next week's worth of entries will be written at sea, and that feels fitting. 

♥️

Marines